A Broadway Haunt

In 1987, the Landmarks Preservation Commission proclaimed the Belasco Theatre, on West Forty-fourth Street, to be worthy of its protection, partly on the basis of the theatre’s interior being “one which is customarily open and accessible to the public.” Unmentioned in this designation, and consigned to different categories of limbo, were (a) a pair of ghosts, said to have haunted the place for decades, and (b) a ten-room duplex that the impresario David Belasco had built above his theatre in 1909. (He died in 1931.) The Belasco apartment, as it is called, in those rare instances when it is called anything at all, has been more or less vacant for seventy-five years, gradually being stripped of its contents, while remaining anything but open and accessible to the public. The door is almost always locked.

One of the ghosts is said to be Belasco’s. The other is that of a showgirl who died when she fell into an elevator shaft backstage. Belasco’s wears a clerical collar (as did the man), and the showgirl’s wears a blue dress. To appease her, or it, every production at the theatre is supposed to feature at least one actress so costumed. In “Awake and Sing!,” the Clifford Odets revival that finished its run at the Belasco last week, that role belonged to Zoë Wanamaker.

The last big sighting of Belasco’s ghost occurred at a performance of “Oh! Calcutta!” in 1972; in the middle of the show, it left its customary seat, in the balcony. The presumption was that it had been offended by the play’s salaciousness, but this hardly seems likely, since Belasco, in life, was, among many other things, a legendary hound. Technically, he was married, but his apartment was the city’s supreme bachelor pad, configured and employed for the seduction of leading and not-so-leading ladies. An elevator took the girls straight up from backstage to a watery vestibule called the Grotto (this was before Hugh Hefner was even born). They passed into an ornate study, where the Bishop of Broadway, as he was known, awaited them, in clerical dress. The pornography was hidden behind sliding panels in the wainscoting of the bedroom upstairs.

Talk of this place, and word that members of the Odets cast had been sneaking into it, awoke a certain kind of neighborhood curiosity, and after weeks of negotiations with the Shubert Organization, which owns the theatre, a tour by flashlight was arranged. One of the guides was Pablo Schreiber—Ralph in the play—who said, at the outset, “Officially? None of us have been up there.” The first stop, up a set of stairs, was Belasco’s old offices, a warren of ruined empty rooms with paint so distressed that it looked like mold. According to signs on doors, several offices had belonged to an enterprise called the American Model Agency—nice. Flashlight beams revealed the names and sentiments of previous visitors, etched in the dust on various glass surfaces: “Jo Anne Worley ’89”; “Love is the greatest thing of all.”

“Wait until you see the steam room,” Schreiber said.

The duplex was upstairs. A climb past an air-conditioning duct revealed a husk of a home, less love nest than crack house. Belasco’s bizarre collection of loot—a pew from Shakespeare’s church, a lock of Napoleon’s hair, a peerless theatrical library—was long gone (auctioned, stolen, stored, or transported to Sardi’s), but in the gloom and soot you could still make out old panelled cupboards and Gothic-arched slots in the wood panelling, where relics, real and fake, used to be displayed. In the study stood an open-faced confession booth. “He used to play the bishop here and have his chorus girls confess to him,” Schreiber said. (A subsequent call to the Shubert Archive revealed that this was not the case. It had probably been Belasco’s phone booth. As for Schreiber’s steam room, it was just the Grotto. “I think it had a waterfall,” the archivist said, “or some water-treatment kind of thing”—hello, ladies!—“considered to be elegant at the time.”)

“Great tile work,” Schreiber said, indicating a giant fireplace in the study. The tiles had been stolen from the Alhambra, in Spain. There was a lifesize cardboard cutout of Bela Lugosi on the balustrade above, a remnant of a visit from a cast member of “Dracula, the Musical,” a recent Belasco show; there was also a life mask of Tom Hewitt, the show’s star, on the mantel. Here and there was a packet of Saltines, or a crushed coffee cup, or an empty box of Garcia Vegas. If there had been a bachelor in this place, in the intervening decades, he seemed not to have been too suave of one.

In a mirrored cabinet, in one room, someone had scrawled four words, one per shelf: “Nasty.” “Olan.” “Lizard.” “Fib.” Schreiber had no theory for it. He made his way downstairs. It was time to be Ralph.